Meeting of the Parliament 20 June 2018
It has been a good debate, in which we have heard some very powerful speeches. I hope that it has united the chamber in a number of respects; I will come back to that shortly.
I want to deal with as many of the issues that have been raised as possible, although, obviously, I will not be able to deal with all of them in the time allotted. Annie Wells made a point that addressed the point that was made by Anas Sarwar and others: of course there will be drugs that are not available either north or south of the border, because we have different assessment processes. There will be drugs available in Scotland that are not available in England. That is the nature of the systems that we have, but they should all be based on the clinical evidence. I will come back to that, because I thought that Jackie Baillie made an important point in that respect.
Anas Sarwar, Jackie Baillie and others talked about the portfolio approach. The portfolio approach was not raised by Montgomery or anyone else in their recommendations. Officials in both Scotland and England all have concerns about it for two very important reasons. One is that it seeks to bypass the standard health technology assessment process. I have not heard anyone in the chamber disagree that clinical effectiveness has to be tested and established; everyone has agreed that it does and said that the medicines have to be licensed. Therefore, the manufacturers of Orkambi need to revisit their current portfolio approach.
That is a very powerful message for the chamber to send to Vertex and other pharmaceutical companies. I agree that the systems have to be reformed, but clinical effectiveness still has to be established and the medicines have to be licensed for patient safety reasons. That is something that Jackie Baillie said, too.